Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Jory Lewis writes about the environment and agriculture, mostly from the global south.

She is the author of the upcoming book Slaves for Peanuts.

In this essay, Jory ventures out from her home in Dakar, Senegal,

to seek out the wisdom and resiliency of Africa's Beobab trees,

ancient arcs of biodiversity that have endured for

millennia migrating across the landscape. As many of the oldest trees have died and younger

ones struggled to survive, Jory bears witness to these elders in a rapidly changing world.

My husband always said he wanted to get married in a forest where a gracious African baub tree could stand in as an altar.

Could there be any more beautiful place, he asked, or any higher authority

than that symbolized by a

Babab's numerous centuries of growth. Bobbub trees are built for benedictions and for wonder,

with their bloated trunks and short, spindly branches that scrape the sky in supplication.

In dry climates like Senegal, those branches might be bare for much of the year,

but when the rains start, a dense covering of dark leaves emerges in an oblong fruit with

velour skin droops and swells. That fuzzy skin can be deceptive. If you touch it, hair-sized

prickles can sting your hands like tiny shards

of glass. At the base of a large baube, I always feel such curiosity about how many events it has

witnessed, how much change it has withstood, how many generations of wanderers have touched or carved messages into its trunk.

...